It's the 88th day of the year so that means it's Piano Day(88 keys on a piano)!

There's actually not much to say about the mix other than it contains some excellent piano music. Most of the tracks are fairly new with many being from 2017 &amp; 2018. There's so much piano based music out there to choose from it's a bit overwhelming when first starting the mix. But as so often happens, once I start with a track or two the rest flows from there. I think the tunes fit pretty well together &amp; I like how it turned out.

Don't forget to visit the piano day website - http://www.pianoday.org/ - where you can play around with the awesome random piano sounds app. Just click on the flip cards for your own cool, ambient piano tune.

I had not planned on doing another piano mix so soon after the last one in November 2015. Then Piano Day happened. On March 28th of this year a group founded by Nils Frahm celebrated the piano and everything around it. This was the second year for the event.

In addition to music released for Piano Day and live events, the Piano Day website, pianoday.org, has this awesome random note generator. I highly recommend playing around with it. You can record your noodlings and play it back on the site. It works great with a tablet where you can hit several notes simultaneously.

The website piano player is what got me started on this mix. I made an audio recording of my random notes and then messed with it by mixing it with a backwards version and a slowed down version and adding a bit of reverb. The result is very listenable. Not an exact composition per se with now structure but it works pretty well as an ambient piano track.

Brendan Landis, recording as Hey Exit, took every recording he could find of Satie's Gymnopedie #1 and played them all at the same time, layered on top of each other, timestretched to the length of the longest recording. The 60 plus recordings combine to create an ethereal, phasing shifting version the famous Gymnopedie #1. I knew immediately that I had to include this in any piano mix.

A couple of quick notes on other tracks...

The mix starts of with Fleeting Smile by Roger Eno. A cut that owes a lot to Satie's Gymnopedies but is still beautiful on it's own. It had been years since I listened to this track and after hearing it again I immediately added to a playlist I have called The Most Beautiful Recordings Ever.

There is another sort of random notes type of piece in the mix and it's from Akria Rabelais. The tracks full name is "Every Tone Is the Prism as Words, Any Unexpected Corners Must Be Slipped Away." It's a 42 minute piece with LOTS of dead air in between notes. I decided to remix it a bit by layering it to eliminate much of the silence. I know this goes totally against the original intent of the track but I was just experimenting with the randomness of rearranging the notes and ended up liking how it sounded.

I hope you enjoy these piano moments. Maybe next year I'll have a piano mix ready on Piano Day. In the meantime go visit the site... pianoday.org

Looking back over the last six years of mixes, the piano has been the featured instrument in many of the the tracks. I guess it goes all the way back to Ambient #1 : Music for Airports. The piano is a perfect instrument for the contemplative, ambient music in the mixes found here.

As far as I can tell, I've done four mixes devoted exclusively to the piano. They are...

This last mix of 2010 is a mix that I did for Headphone Commute about 3 months ago. They were kind enough to ask for a mix & I was honored to add it to their great collection of mixes they post at their own site & at their Mixcloud site.

I realized that if I was going to post this piano mix I'd better do it now because the title is "pno 2010" so I need to squeeze it into 2010 before it's gone.

This mix starts with John Cage – “On a Landscape”, which is appropriate, because that tune is the reason I did this piano mix. I’d never heard “In a Landscape” when a friend linked to it on youtube. What a great piece of music. So I decided to build a piano mix with that as the jumping off point.

The other unusual piece in this mix is Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou – “Golgotha” by an Ethiopian nun living in Jerusalem. Her music is unique, it filters the traditional Ethiopian pentatonic scale through classical technique– in the end sounding like impressionistic jazz. Wonderful music.

I cross familiar territory here with another piano mix. I think this is the third I've done.

There's no particular reason for doing a piano mix other than I happened to run into a few nice piano tunes & figured I'd slap together a short mix.

As usual this is fairly quiet music, good for reading the paper on a Sunday morning.(when newspapers disappear I'll really miss doing that) I'll be sending this one to Mick & his "15 Minutes of Fame" mix series which you can find here...15 minutes.